Online dress shirt retailer Mizzen & Main experimenting with Short North showroom

The first Mizzen & Main shop is open – just don’t expect to walk out of it with a stack of new shirts and accessories.

The online dress shirt retailer now has a brick-and-mortar operation at 772 N. High St. in the Short North, but that physical version of Mizzen & Main is more showroom than store, co-founder Web Smith told me.

“It’s a bit of an experiment,” he said.

Customers are invited to look, touch and buy in the 1,000-square-foot space but the purchases are shipped to the house rather than taken from the shop.

“Instead of worrying about what’s in stock, we can showcase, rotate what we have frequently, move things in and out,” he said.

Dallas-based Mizzen & Main was started last year by Kevin Lavelle and Steven DeWitt, both based in Texas, and Smith who calls Columbus home. It specializes in dress shirts that take the moisture-wicking technology of athletic apparel and applies it to dress clothes.

“It looks like a dress shirt, but has all the characteristics of performance fabric,” Lavelle told me.

The company launched with two shirts. Today it sells 12 shirts and two Henleys (collarless men’s pullover shirts) and is developing blazers and denim as well. But the business is more than Mizzen & Main’s products. The site and shop stock more than 200 items, including other apparel, accessories such as Rock Avenue Bowties, a new business from former Ohio State University player Malcolm Jenkins, and home goods including small pieces of furniture and bar ware.

“It’s a lifestyle site,” Lavelle said. “Classic style.”

The company operated a pop-up shop for five months inside Brigade at 940 N. High St. in the Short North. Smith said that validated the brick-and-mortar potential for the business and solidified Columbus as the launch city.

“We felt the Short North is experiencing this great upward trajectory,” he said. “Plus we already have friends on the street who we work well with.”

Mizzen & Main’s products also are sold in six boutiques outside Columbus – one in Cleveland, two in Texas and one each in New Jersey, New York and Louisiana. The shirts are American made.

“We want to build a great American brand,” Lavelle said. “We want to show that you can make things here and have a healthy business.”

Keeping production here makes it easier to move the product and keep an eye on quality control.

Lavelle declined to share sales figures but said they’ve sold thousands of shirts since the 2012 launch and expect sales to be in the seven figures by year three.